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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27211585">Player Piano</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/beer_good/pseuds/beer_good'>beer_good</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Community: spook_me, Dawn Summers-centric, Gen, Identity Issues, Memory Magic, Post-Canon, Toys</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 19:06:49</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,212</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27211585</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/beer_good/pseuds/beer_good</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>When Dawn was six years old, her dad got her a music box. No biggie, it's just a music box, just a childhood toy she's kept for all these years, a tune she occasionally hums. Just a small part of the pool of memories and quirks that make a person. And obviously she should have more important stuff on her mind after Sunnydale turned into a giant crater. So why does the world suddenly seem so quiet?</p><p>Written for the <b>spook_me</b> ficathon and also <b>buffyversebingo</b>.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Buffyverse Bingo, Spook Me Ficathon, Spook Me Ficathon 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Player Piano</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><div class="inner">
<p></p><div class="entry-content"><p><b>Title:</b> Player Piano<br/>
<b>Author:</b> Beer Good <br/>
<b>Fandom:</b> Buffy the Vampire Slayer, post-series<br/>
<b>Characters/Pairing:</b> Dawn<br/>
<b>Rating:</b> PG13<br/>
<b>Word count:</b> ~1000<br/>
<b>Summary:</b> When Dawn was six years old, her dad got her a music box. No biggie, it's just a music box, just a childhood toy she's kept for all these years, a tune she occasionally hums. Just a small part of the pool of memories and quirks that make a person. And obviously she should have more important stuff on her mind after Sunnydale turned into a giant crater. So why does the world suddenly seem so quiet?</p><p>Written for <span class="ljuser"><a href="https://spook-me.dreamwidth.org/profile"></a><a href="https://spook-me.dreamwidth.org/"><b>spook_me</b></a></span>, the prompt "evil toys" and <a href="https://images53.fotki.com/v1657/photos/6/3814576/16181654/il_570xN_1148356706_ewsj-vi.jpg">this</a> picture.</p><p><em>From the moment of my birth to the instant of my death</em><br/>
<em>There are patterns I must follow just as I must breathe each breath</em><br/>
<em>Like a rat in a maze the path before me lies</em><br/>
<em>And the pattern never alters until the rat dies</em><br/>
- Paul Simon</p><p><a id="cutid1" name="cutid1"></a> <b>Player Piano</b></p><p>Dawn got the music box for her sixth birthday. Not <em>on</em> it, that's part of the story, one of her earliest clear memories; Dad was away for work, far away in Europe, and when he came back he had the music box with him, wrapped in waxy paper. He helped her unwrap it since it was something she had to be careful with, then he wound it up and it played a melody she'd never heard before but which stuck in her head immediately. According to Dad, it was a Czechoslovakian folk melody; he showed her on the map. He said it made him think of her because of the sunrise painted on its side.</p><p>(Dawn never actually had a sixth birthday. She's asked Dad in one of their increasingly rare phone calls if he remembers going there; he does. Czechoslovakia no longer exists. The airline went bankrupt in 1994. Apart from the music box there is no physical evidence that he ever went there.)</p><p>For most of her childhood, the music box simply sat on a shelf. Every now and then, she'd take it down, dust it off (Mom kept telling her to clean her room better), wind it up and listen to the melody. Not that she <em>needed</em> to; she knew it by heart and it was always in there somewhere - not to the point of argh-get-out-of-my-head, just enough that if she was doing something and absent-mindedly humming or whistling, it would be that song. During the brief phase in sixth grade where she tried to learn the violin, that melody was the only one she managed to learn by heart (she didn't have the sheet music). If she'd sing a silly song about anchovies, it built on the music box tune.</p><p>(After she found out all her memories were made up by a bunch of Czech monks, she played it every day. After Mom died, she played it every day. After Tara died, she played it every day. When Buffy was dead, she played it every day until the Buffybot picked up on it and started singing along and it got weird; what part of its programming made it do that?)</p><p>Yet it was never exactly the same. Every time she listened to the actual music box - maybe just once every three-four months or so - her memory of it turned out to be slightly off; she'd added small touches to it in her head; sped it up or slowed it down a bit, imagined an extra little reprise of the chorus, a little countermelody under the main theme. Every time she was struck by how simple it sounded when played on that little ting-ting-ting of the music box, so simple and still so bright and catchy. After Tara told her about meditation, she'd think of the tune as a sort of centering exercise, a way to get back to baseline.</p><p>(You can't google a melody. She's bought a number of CDs of Eastern European (and Central European) folk music without finding it. She even bought a cheap keyboard and tried to pick out the melody but it seems like it's missing some notes, somehow.)</p><p>It was a few days after the fall of Sunnydale that she woke up and realised that she couldn't remember the tune (slipping away, like a dream you can <em>almost</em> remember) and that the music box was now so many shards somewhere underneath the crater, along with everything else she ever owned and wasn't wearing on the bus. She wasn't sure why it was the music box that brought it home for her, and it felt so silly to care about it; they all left both people and things behind, Jenny's and Tara's and Mom's graves lost forever and Anya and so many girls never even got to be buried and…</p><p>(She never knew Jenny, and suddenly that somehow scares the living shit out of her.)</p><p>But she can't remember the song anymore. At all. Ever since she watched the only hometown she's ever had fall into a hole, it's gone; just a faint memory of <em>what</em> it was, without the actual music.</p><p>(And why does she suddenly remember (thinks she remember?) that the cheerful painting on the side of the music box was of a monastery, with windows that glowed faintly green, and that the melody really <em>sounded</em> like a sunrise somehow, and she suddenly knows that the song was called "Dawn"… And she can't <em>not</em> think about how almost all of the reality-changer spells she's read about or experienced firsthand require a keystone, an anchor of some sort to maintain the illusion. She thinks about Orlon Windows and amulets and masks and talismans and what happens to the things they raised when they're smashed. She remembers the Buffybot slowly winding down, unaware that it was dying, that it was a thing that could die, that it would be completely forgotten in the excitement over Buffy's return.)</p><p>There is so much to do with all the new Slayers, so little time to pause and regroup and grieve. And she <em>knows</em> they're all traumatised and she's 18 and everything is messed up and it's perfectly natural to feel like she's not acting like herself, like people keep forgetting her, which just makes her even more scared to bring up something as dumb as being completely unable to remember a song from a childhood toy. That reality feels so thin, like if she were to say it out loud the ground would open up under her feet and she would have never existed.</p><p>Dawn grew up surrounded by people who defied prophecy, who survived the impossible, reading and watching stories about self-actualization and individualism and deciding for yourself who you get to be. She knows so many stories in which someone who's raised to be one thing learns to be something else, learns to shake off thoughts and patterns she was taught was a basic fact of existence and sing her own song instead.</p><p>As she goes to bed at night with complete silence in her head, she really, really hopes this is that story.</p><p>She looks up at the cheap reading lamp in the motel room and switches it off; the second the current is broken, it ceases to be a lamp and the room goes completely dark.</p></div></div>
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